Boston Globe: "Is Our Fear of Insomnia What's Actually Keeping Us Up At Night?"

From the article:

 

"There’s another hidden hazard to more-sleep-is-always-better recommendations, Siegel says. “When you tell people to increase their sleep, you make them anxious about sleep.” That leads to healthy, seven-hour-a-night sleepers visiting their doctors, and their physicians perhaps allaying their concerns with a solution from a medicine bottle. “The obvious result is they’re going to get sleeping pills.”

 

"PHYSICIANS WROTE MORE THAN 55 MILLION prescriptions for Lunesta, Ambien, and other sedative-hypnotic sleep aids in 2014, according to IMS Health. But pill-enabled sleep gains can be modest. An FDA-reviewed Lunesta trial showed that subjects fell asleep only 15 minutes faster and slept 37 minutes longer (for a total 6 hours, 22 minutes) than the control group. While it’s unclear whether sedative-hypnotics reproduce the physiology of natural sleep, users have reported side effects like sleepwalking, sleep-driving, hallucinations, even outbursts of physical violence. "

 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2016/08/17/our-fear-insomnia-what-actually-keeping-night/IPs1ibeU3qhmcQ8D2aQfrM/story.html 

 

I was surprised that the Luntesa study showed only falling asleep 15 minutes soon and sleeping for only 37 minutes longer.  It doesn't sound worth the chance of developing a dependency to me. 

That's the power of advertising! They don't give the facts. I found info about how little (if any) improvement there is with benzos. The truth is that the negatively affect the quality of sleep, so even if you're not awake, you're not necessarily experiencing deep, restorative sleep with the meds.

There is another side to this:

 

When taken infrequently, hypnotics can make the difference between sleeping and not sleeping at all.

It's strange, isn't it?  The less concerned we are about sleep, the better we sleep.  Unfortunately, easy to say but hard to do.  There's no off switch for the mind.